The first thing that strikes one, of course, is that the last three to be baptised were baptised nearly 40 years after the first one. I’m pretty certain they weren’t triplets born late, because Eleanor Vause, the mother, had been dead for nearly 20 years. She was buried in Crowle shortly after the baptism of her youngest child Samuel Wyatt Vause (spelt Vuse in the baptism register) who was baptised in Crowle on 14 Feb 1840 (their other children were baptised in Thorne, Fishlake and Hull).

The two possibilities that immediately struck me, of course, was that this must either be a different John and Eleanor Vause, or that these were late baptisms, which means that the three children baptised in 1860 must have been in their twenties, at least.

I’m pretty certain that the parents were not a different set. John Vause appears as an innkeeper in the 1861 census, with his unmarried daughter Betsey. Another daughter, Fanny, was married to a surgeon Phineas Samuel Ellis (and their younger children were baptised at Crowle in the 1850s), and Betsey was living with them in the 1881 census (John Vause, the inkeeper, died in 1863). The eldest son, Richard Vause, published an announcement of the death of his father John Vause of Crowle in the Natal Mercury in 1863.

So the only other possibility, unless I’m missing something, is that these three children had somehow not been baptised before, and were baptised in their 20s in Crowle.

But they do not seem to have been mentioned in any other family or other records. This is the first I have heard of them, after 30 years of research into the family.

I can think of two possibilities that might account for this:

1. They had died in infancy2. That they were mentally defective, and the family didn’t mention them

The first seems unlikely, unless the Church of England Vicar of Crowle had secretly absorbed Mormon theology and was baptising for the dead.

The second is possible, and perhaps they were baptised when they were visiting the family from an asylum somewhere.

I suppose the next thing would be to examine the 1851 and 1841 censuses of Crowle to see if there is any mention of them — any other suggestions? If you have suggestions, click on COMMENTS below.

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Found the answer to this one. Carles Ellson on the soc.genealogy.britain newsgroup sent me a census record that shows that John Vause’s son John also married an Eleanor, and so those were the grandchildren of John and Eleanor Vause senior.

And as I didn’t have them in my records, that’s a useful addition to the family tree.